Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics
After the long dark eclipse of the Soviet period, the Russian Orthodox Church is again central to an understanding of contemporary Russia, and this book provides a fine starting point.
In sharp, compact chapters, Judah travels from the founding myths, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the Milosevic era, the wars, the postwar UN stewardship, and, finally, the contentious passage to independence.
Hale disputes the notion that ethnicity generates conflict or, in fact, causes anything. He also questions the value of defining ethnicity as the two dominant schools do -- as either primordial or socially constructed.
Theorists and politicians like to think that international institutions can have a decisive impact on the domestic institutional choices of aspiring member states, prodding them toward democracy and free-market capitalism; Epstein agrees with this perspective but argues that it is borne out only in the right circumstances.
Combs argues that Soviet leaders lived in an "alternate universe" whose character and content took form from the ideology they professed and suggests that their undoing occurred as a result of the cumulative weight of disconfirming evidence -- not, he stresses, because the pressure imposed by the Reagan administration forced the Soviet leadership to change course.
By reconstructing in detail the curve of Russian foreign policy across the Yugoslav wars and the domestic debates surrounding policy choices, Headley both illuminates an important dimension of Russian foreign policy and, more important, gives telling depth to the larger picture.
